The power of text
pharmafile | October 1, 2003 | Feature | Medical Communications |Â Â advertising, digi pharma, dtcÂ
After a rocky start, advertising on the web has started to take off. Spending will pass $8 billion in the US by 2006, predicts research company eMarketer. After falling to $6 billion in 2002, Internet ad spending has increased by 12.2% this year.
In the UK, online advertising has grown at a sedate but respectable 18% to reach almost £200 million last year.
Some of the US spend is direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing of prescription pharmaceuticals, which of course is banned in Europe. But that ban is not a reason for ignoring the web as an advertising vehicle, since possibilities include disease awareness sites and advertising on doctor-only sites. At some point soon, pharma marketing managers are going to need to consider Internet advertising of some sort.
The great shortcoming of traditional advertising, summed up in the old adage "Half of my advertising budget is wasted: the trouble is, I don't know which half" is overcome by web ads, because the advertiser only pays for ads that are actually seen and acted on in the jargon, they pay for 'click-throughs'. Another great boon is instant feedback on the success or failure of campaigns.
It is beginning to happen. And it took a long time, because, according to new research from the University of Chicago, we overlooked one crucial human dimension people don't buy immediately they see an ad.
As professors Pradeep K. Chintagunta, Jean-Pierre Dub, and Puneet Manchanda, with doctoral student Khim Yong Goh, suggest in The Effects of Banner Advertising on Consumer Inter-purchase Times and Expenditures in Digital Environments; "As in traditional advertising, exposure to banner ads may result in purchase behaviour after a temporal gap."
"If you just measure clicks, you are not capturing the real effect of advertising," says Dub. "What you want to see is whether people are purchasing items."
The authors use data from an Internet-only firm that sells healthcare and beauty products and non-prescription drugs. Their new dataset is unique because the authors are able to measure individual stimulus (advertising) as well as response (purchase visits and dollars spent).
Seeing the ads more frequently brought customers back to shop sooner. The more recently consumers saw an ad, the faster they came back to buy. Exposure to banner ads on more websites also had a similar effect. However, exposure to a higher number of ads with different creative treatments delayed consumers' return to the website.
And that is just banner ads, which are less and less favoured, as customers essentially tune them out. Click-through rates for banners have been in decline from a peak of around 5% mostly due to their novelty value in the late 90s to around 0.3% now. Today, there is a new game in town : the micro-ad.
Last year, Google started a quiet revolution of micro ads unobtrusive, self-serve, text-based advertisements. Just copy and a hyperlink.
So why do they work and why is the micro-ad market already worth $2 billion a year?
The Internet is a text-based medium. Usage patterns, 'banner blindness,' and eye tracking studies show the way people scan Web sites is inherently different from the way they scan newspapers.
In newspapers, the eye goes from pictures to the headline to the body. Online, people look at the headline, then the text, and then the images. The web is more like radio than TV, and depends on the power of words. As in conventional ads, success comes from good, well-targeted copy.
The other key feature of micro-ads is that they sit naturally alongside searches, and since most people find things on the web using search engines, that has been crucial to their success.
So web advertising, after flirting with TV-like techniques of rotating images, movies and the like, seems likely to settle down in a text-based world.
But will the rules change for DTC in Europe? There are two camps: the pharma companies, agencies, publishers and the European Commission who want to see change of some kind, and on the other side are doctors who of course have to pick up the pieces if it all goes wrong and consumer protection bodies.
With a foot in both camps, the medical journals bring an interesting perspective to this long-running debate.
In 1998, as a means of bringing light to this heated debate, The Lancet called for a trial of direct-to-consumer advertising. Commenting recently, it said "The EC provides the backdrop for a vast natural experiment into direct-to-consumer advertising, since adjacent and culturally similar countries could form experimental and control arms. The natural funder of such research, which must remain entirely independent of the researchers, is the drug industry." Soany takers?
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